The thing about comics, William Goldsmith says, is the creative freedom they give. ”And I have always liked the intimacy that images on a small scale give you.”

Goldsmith is a Glasgow-based cartoonist who made a splash with his first graphic novel Vignettes of Ystov, a story cycle set in a fictitious eastern European town full of muted colours and shabby Soviet-style architecture. Published in 2011., it was a beautiful and beautifully distinctive work, one that suggested there were corners that the graphic novel had still to explore.

After then drawing a biography of John Muir he now returns with The Bind, a novel about bookbinding. Yes, bookbinding. It’s also a book about ghosts and family disputes too, as the firm of Egret Bindings attempt to create their most lavish, sumptuous binding the company has ever produced. Think jewels. think spiders made out of jewels. (Spiders play a major part in what happens.)

Goldsmith’s art is a mixture of rough outlines, pastel wash and intricate detail. And, appropriately enough in a book about bookbinders, he clearly enjoys playing with the bookishness of the graphic novel. He even manages to include foldout pages.

There is a grand Edwardian melodrama going on here, a rise and fall story if you like, but the real pleasure is in Goldsmith’s eye for small scale detail. The implements used, the detail embossed.

Below, Goldsmith answers five questions for Graphic Content.

Tell us the origins of your new graphic novel The Bind?
I came across some articles about a real life bookbinding company at the turn of the 20th century and was fascinated.

Initially I liked the idea of a story about a book passing through lots of different hands across the ages, but in the end the story just became about the two people binding the book, and seeing how they could play off each other, as two very different personalities. 

In your research did you discovers that The Bind’s vision of bookbinding - with its ghosts and duplicity - was typical of the industry?

Absolutely not! I think Victorian / Edwardian bookbinders did play pranks on each other in their workshops, but nothing on the scale of what we see in The Bind.

Spiders? For or against?

For.


Do you have a thing for old architecture (we keep noticing all the lovely detail on the buildings here and in your previous book)?
Probably, I enjoy drawing it, and the challenge of showing lots of ornament in an economic way.


What influence, if any, has living in Glasgow had on your work?
I have a real attachment to Glasgow as a city - there's aspects of it in my previous book, probably more than this one. Things like the discarded furniture. Also people's friendliness to each other, even if they're strangers, has perhaps made me more observant about people in an everyday sense, which again comes into Vignettes of Ystov.

The Bind, by William Goldsmith, is published by Jonathan Cape, priced £20.